Daniel A. Payne

Daniel Alexander Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, on the twenty-fourth of February 1811. He founded a school for free Black children in Charleston at the age of eighteen. The school was closed by the South Carolina legislature in 1834 under a new law making it illegal to teach any Black person to read or write. He left South Carolina permanently that year.

He took his theological education at Gettysburg Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (1835-37), was ordained Lutheran but joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1841. He was elevated to AME bishop in 1852 and served in that office for forty-one years.

In 1856 the AME Church purchased Wilberforce University in southwestern Ohio — a school founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate the children of free Black Ohioans and escaped enslaved people from Kentucky. When the school's owners suspended operations in 1862 due to the Civil War, Payne organized the purchase by the AME and was elected the school's president on the tenth of March 1863.

He thus became the first African American president of any institution of higher education in the United States. He served as Wilberforce president for thirteen years (1863-76), and the school he led continued — through every successive generation — to be the principal AME Church university and the educational training ground for AME bishops and ministers.

He died in Wilberforce, Ohio, on the second of November 1893, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the bishop who founded American Black higher education by purchase.